A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [27]
“You okay?” Bill asked.
“A little hot is all,” she said.
“Thanks for lunch,” Brian said, a boy who remembered his manners at odd moments, sometimes an hour after the meal, running downstairs from Matt’s room to thank Bridget in the kitchen after she had washed all the dishes.
“You’re welcome,” Bridget said, hoping that Brian would have a reasonably good time this weekend, that he and Matt would find activities to keep themselves busy until the wedding itself.
“What’s wrong?” Bill asked quietly.
“I think I just have to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
Bridget hated public bathrooms with their germs, the toilet paper on the floor, the blocked toilets. She loathed the automatic faucets that refused to produce water, the hot-air dryers that made her desperate for hand lotion. As she reached the door that said WOMEN, sweat beaded on her forehead, and she felt a familiar panic and dizziness. She searched for the last cubicle in the second row, a need to be as far away from others as possible.
She shut the door and bent over. She raised the toilet seat with her boot. She closed her eyes and braced herself, two fists up against the opposing metal walls, and waited. A wave of nausea overtook her. She coughed experimentally. Nothing. The sweat had soaked her hair under the wig and trickled down her spine.
Oh God, she thought. She would have to do this alone. Bill could not come in here. How soon would he begin to worry? Would he send someone after her? Another wave rose, and she bent further over. She should try to vomit, get rid of it, but she didn’t dare put a finger in her mouth. She might have touched something dirty. She had to be particularly careful about germs now and had learned to wash her hands a dozen times a day. A third wave passed through her, and she tried once more to vomit.
After a time, Bridget straightened up. A momentary lull? She waited a minute and then dared to open her eyes. She took a fistful of toilet paper and wiped her forehead and face. She lifted the back of the wig and mopped up the sweat that had accumulated there. She felt distinctly better. Had she won a reprieve? On her wedding weekend? She tossed the tissue into the bowl.
She emerged from the stall and stood before a mirror to wash her hands. Her face was pale and undefined, the extra pounds (ounces on her face) blurring her jawline. The wig had been washed this month and blown into a flip. Bridget never knew when she opened the small square cardboard box from Brooklyn exactly who she’d be that month. A matron with a turned-under pageboy? An aging ingenue with curls? Or someone more hip, the hair falling straight to her shoulders? Bridget had written “no flip” on her notes when she returned the wig for cleaning each month (FedEx: if Bridget sent it out at 6:00 p.m. on Monday night, she got it back before 10:00 on Wednesday morning—forty hours without her wig, during which she sometimes wore a synthetic backup), but the word “flip” must not translate well into Yiddish, she had decided. Bridget had been mildly distraught, a week ago, to see that she would have to be married in a flip, but she knew enough not to try to wash it herself, which she had once done, the outcome disastrous and resulting in a shoulder-length Afro.
When she left the ladies’ room, she found the boys sitting at the table with their chairs tipped back. They were satiated and would sleep again. Bill had been watching for her, but it was possible she hadn’t been gone long enough to worry him. She put a smile on her face, one that grew more genuine with gratitude for the reprieve. (Grateful to whom? God? Could he possibly care about Bridget and her nausea with 9/11 and terrorists to think about? She could hear her father say, he used to say it all the time—we don’t amount to a hill of beans—a phrase